We Face a Climate Emergency

A substantial gap exists between the Paris Climate Agreement's rhetoric and the reality of what must actually be done to achieve its stated climate stabilization intentions. Besides celebrating that the world’s nations could reach an agreement, the next step is to understand that we are in the midst of a genuine Climate Emergency.Therefore, the world cannot gradually begin to change current fossil fuels’ pathways, nor can it wait to reduce demand and consumption of fossil fuels sometime in the next decade. We need to devote our full attention to phasing out fossil fuels now.

The Paris Climate Agreement triumphed with the right rhetoric; the world agreed it surely would keep warming “to well below 2°C,”[1] even aspiring to 1.5°C. The reality of what it will take to get anywhere close to the 1.5°C target however, reveals the revolution required to deliver what is necessary to match reality with rhetoric.

A Declaration of a Climate Emergency is necessary because:

The current dominant justifications for emphasizing methane gas as usable fossil fuel relies on dramatically understating and underestimating: (1) methane's near-term heat forcing on the accelerating rate of climate change, and (2) methane's leakage in the process of hydraulic fracturing and distribution for use.[2] Methane use brings us more rapidly toward a climate tipping point.

To meet Paris’s targets, unproven and undemonstrated technological breakthroughs are posited that would “suck carbon” from the atmosphere. However, there is no assurance that these technological “miracles” can ever be demonstrated to work—they must also work economically, at massive scale and in time. Hope is a required virtue, but insufficient action based on implausible technologies entails a risk level that is completely unacceptable. So the collective INDCs of the world do not plausibly achieve climate stabilization within the temperature targets.[5]

For these and other straightforward reasons, we the undersigned call for a Declaration of Climate Emergency, immediately pointing the way toward rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels—reductions far exceeding those conceived and intended in the Paris Climate Agreement. We have the technology. And, we are capable of doing better...for ourselves, our children, and our future.

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The global warming emergency is the most critical moral issue of our time. The Association for the Tree of Life (ATL) is working on effective responses that meet the scope, scale, and urgency of the crisis. ATL is a lead organization calling for and catalyzing the broad-based media, educational, and grassroots campaigns resulting in Emergency Climate Mobilization that produces net zero US carbon emissions within a decade. ATL is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)3 organization.